Deep Silver Backtracks on Dead Island Bloody Torso Gaff

Developer Deep Silver has had to backtrack on its decision to promote violent zombie slasher Dead Island: Riptide with the collectors' bust of a dismembered woman's torso.

Clad in only a Union Jack bikini and missing its head and limbs, the gory statuette raked in criticism for misogyny, glorifying violence and bad taste.

The backlash led to the developer issuing an apology for the premium-priced Zombie Bait Edition of the game on its Twitter page.

“We deeply apologise for any offence caused by the Dead Island: Riptide 'Zombie Bait Edition', the collector's edition announced for Europe and Australia,” the company said in a statement.

In an attempt to explain its thinking, Deep Silver stated that it designed the bust to appear as “cut up” as fans had done to zombies in the original game, Dead Island.

“We sincerely regret this choice,” the statement continued.

“We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver's entire international team today.”

Deep Silver previously courted controversy and outrage with the release of the original Dead Island, which included code that labelled one of the female characters “feminist wh*re”, which the company promptly expressed regret about to games writer Tracey John.

This follows on the back of a recent warning by US Vice President Biden that the games industry is suffering from a public perception problem over its glorification of violence.

James Lee

James Lee is a freelance writer and analyst with extensive experience in the technology, media and games sectors. For the past few years he has provided content for internationally published industry reports, SEO companies and a variety of news-focused websites. Prior to this, James was responsible for covering news and producing in-depth features for GamesIndustry.biz while occasionally contributing to its sister-site. Eurogamer.net. In addition to this he has contributed to other notable sites such as CVG.co.uk, Edge-Online and DigitalSpy.